The value that your small business is shipping to customers is the beating heart of your company. The success and future of your business depend exactly on this: the tangible value you are creating and shipping out the door every single day.
But here is the problem.
Often, when I ask entrepreneurs to explain the value they deliver, a strange thing happens. They start to talk. And then they talk some more. They keep talking until I literally have to stop them.
It is honestly boring for me to listen to philosophies like that.
Why? Because they are thinking too theoretically. They are stuck inside their own heads, thinking from the company’s perspective, rather than thinking with the minds of their customers. They are in love with their product, their features, and their hard work.
But the customer doesn’t care about your hard work. They care about their own problems.
If you want to win, you have to flip the script. You need a description of your value that comes 100% from the customer’s perspective.
When you do this, you create a better description, you communicate better, and you stop boring people. You move from being “just another business” to being the only logical choice.
Your customer needs a short, understandable, and clear description of why you matter. In fact, they need you to be able to explain it in less than 140 characters.
Here is how you do it.
The Discovery Framework: Clearing the Fog
Before you can write a short, punchy sentence, you have to do the work. You cannot just guess. Writing is easy; thinking is hard. And most entrepreneurs skip the thinking part.
If you want to create a value description that can be easily explained to your customers, you need to answer these five questions first.
Think of this as an exercise to clear away the fog so you can see the destination clearly.
1. Who are your target customers, really?
Start with your target customers. But I don’t mean just their age or location. That is demographic data, and it is boring.
I want you to dig deeper. Who are they? What do they want? What do they actually do all day?
You need to step into their shoes. What does their Tuesday morning look like before they use your product? Is it chaotic? Is it stressful? Is it slow?
You need to learn as much as possible about them. What you learn here will dictate the “look and feel” of your value description.
For example, if you are selling to a stressed-out investment banker, your value description shouldn’t be “fun and whimsical.” It should be “fast and accurate.” If you don’t know who you are talking to, it doesn’t matter what you say.
Related: 5 Simple Steps to Attract Your Ideal Customers
2. What is the “Ouch”?
Continue with the problems, desires, and needs that your products and services satisfy.
I call this the “Ouch.” What specific pain are you solving?
If there is no pain, there is no sale. People move much faster to cure pain than they do to gain pleasure.
These problems need to be the centerpiece of your value description. This is the wedge that creates a difference between your value and your competitor’s value.
Think about it this way: You are not selling a drill; you are selling a hole in the wall. You are not selling a mattress; you are selling a good night’s sleep without back pain.
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
Theodore Levitt
If you aren’t solving a problem, you aren’t shipping value. You are just shipping a commodity.
Related: Use Innovation and Creativity Tools for Success – Jobs to Be Done
3. How will you deliver the message?
How will you communicate this value to your customers or partners?
This question forces you to think about the communication techniques you will use. It is important to define every possible technique because it influences how the description will look and feel.
A value proposition on a billboard looks different than one in an email subject line. On a billboard, you have 3 seconds while someone is driving 60 miles per hour. In an email, you have their attention for maybe 5 seconds before they hit delete.
You need to know the context of where your value will be shipped.
4. What are the simplest words you can find?
This is where most entrepreneurs get stuck.
They suffer from the “Curse of Knowledge.” You know so much about your industry that you forget what it’s like to know nothing.
Often, when conducting this exercise, business owners use technical words. “Synergy,” “paradigm shift,” “scalable architecture.”
These words are understandable only to them and the experts in the field.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein
To the customer, it sounds like noise. It sounds like work.
You need a brainstorming session here.
Your goal is to find as many descriptive words as possible, and then ruthlessly cut the complex ones. You are looking for that one word that is clear and understandable—not for you and your team, but for your customer.
The Grandma Test: If you explained your business to your grandmother, would she understand it instantly? If not, simplify it.
5. Can you compose the sentence?
Now, when you have everything you need—the target audience, the problem, the method, and the simple words—you can start composing the sentence.
You can start with more than one description. You can even start with a long description. Write a whole paragraph if you have to. Get it all out of your system.
But then, you must do the work to shorten them. This leads us to the most important part of the exercise.
The 140-Character Constraint
You must limit yourself to the good old Twitter limit of 140 characters.
You might ask, “Why 140 characters? X (previously Twitter) allows more now. LinkedIn allows more. My website allows infinite text.”
It isn’t about the social media platform; it is about human behavior. You know this to be true: nobody has time.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Blaise Pascal
We live in an attention economy. Your customers are bombarded with thousands of messages a day. Nobody has the time to read, look at, or listen to something that requires more than several seconds to understand.
If you cannot explain your value in 140 characters, you do not understand your value well enough yet.
The “Adjective Purge” Strategy to Shorten Your Value Description
How do you get there? You use the “Adjective Purge.”
Draft your long sentences, and then start cutting.
- Remove the fluff words (very, really, actually).
- Remove the adjectives that don’t add facts (amazing, world-class, premier).
- Remove the jargon.
The best way to describe this is with an example.
Example:
- Before (Boring Philosophy): “We provide world-class, synergistic software solutions that enable enterprise-level organizations to leverage their data for optimal performance outcomes.” (Too long, too boring).
- After (Value Shipped): “We help companies cut data processing time by 50%.” (Short. Punchy. Valuable).
Keep cutting until you have several options that are 140 characters or less.
The “So What?” Test of Your Value
Before you go out and test these on real people, you need to run them through one final internal filter. I call this the “So What?” test.
Read your 140-character sentence out loud and ask yourself (or have a brutally honest friend ask you): “So what?”
- You say: “We use 256-bit encryption.”
- Customer says: “So what?”
- You say: “So your data is never stolen.”
- Customer says: “Ah, okay. I want that.”
If your value proposition describes features (what you do), you will fail the “So what?” test.
If it describes benefits (what the customer gets), you will pass.
Rewrite your sentence until the answer to “So what?” is obvious.
Test Your Value to Improve It
Once you have your short, punchy descriptions, you are not done. You have a hypothesis, but you do not have proof.
In the startup world, we don’t guess. We validate. You must start testing your value descriptions to find the winner.
Here are the specific ways you can test this in the real world:
The Website Test:
Put one of your 140-character descriptions on your website’s homepage, right at the top (the “Hero” section).
Analyze the data. How many people see it? How many clicks does the call-to-action button get? This is your conversion rate.
After one week, swap it for a different description. Record the data again. When you finish, the numbers will tell you which one wins. The data doesn’t lie.
The “Sales Floor” Test:
Give the descriptions to your sales team to communicate directly with customers.
Ask them to record not just the sales numbers, but the nonverbal communication of the customers.
This is crucial because data tells you what happened, but body language tells you why.
Do their eyes light up? Do they lean in? Or do they look confused and start checking their phone?
You need this qualitative data to check how the description “lands” in a real conversation. If you have to explain your explanation, it failed.
The Presentation Test:
Create presentations that feature the value description and publish them online.
Analyze the views and the click-through rates. The data will tell you which one resonates more with your audience.
The Blog Feedback Loop:
Create a blog post (like this one!) and ask your customers what they think.
Don’t be shy. Ask them bluntly: Does this value solve your problem?
You can receive comments and different answers that can help you to improve your value description. Sometimes, a customer will leave a comment that describes your business better than you did.
If that happens, steal their words! They know what they value better than you do.
The Survey:
Create an open-question survey asking customers to describe their problems and needs in their own words.
Don’t use multiple-choice questions here. You want to capture their raw language.
Often, they will write your value description for you better than you could.
The Bottom Line
This is not a one-time exercise. The market changes. Your competitors change. Your customers’ needs change.
But the principle remains the same: Clarity is King.
When you test your value descriptions and collect ideas from customers, you stop guessing. You can change your words, choose the best one, and finally ship a message that resonates.
Don’t settle for boring philosophies. Do the work, keep it under 140 characters, and let the customer decide what works.
Now, go ship some value.
